The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [189]
Possibly to relieve the orphanages of their workload, in 1992 mainland China began encouraging large-scale international adoption. That year, about two hundred children from China joined American families. Payment for services often occurred under mysterious circumstances (some American parents were asked to donate $3,000 in $100 bills to an orphanage), causing the U.S. media to hint at a profit motive. In 1993, the New York Times Sunday magazine ran a cover story about adoptions from China under the headline “China’s Market in Orphan Girls,” calling the babies “the Newest Chinese Export.” In response, the PRC temporarily shut down its adoption program, but resumed it shortly afterward—no doubt because the American demand for Chinese children was simply too great for the program to end permanently.
Because of a trend among American women to delay marriage and childbearing in favor of their careers, there were, by the end of the twentieth century, greater numbers of affluent, childless couples eager to adopt. But they also had to compete for fewer available children, because growing social acceptance of single mothers in the United States meant more of these mothers were keeping babies born out of wedlock. Moreover, the United States adoption system had become a bureaucratic nightmare, and other countries enforced strict rules regarding international adoptions, which favored younger, traditional, and heterosexual couples. For many Americans, adopting a baby girl from China was their only opportunity to start a family, and between 1985 and 2002, Americans adopted more than thirty-three thousand infants from the PRC—the largest source of American adoptions from abroad.60
The typical couple adopting a Chinese immigrant baby was educated, older, and upper-middle-class. According to one study, their median age was 42.7 years, and about 65 percent of them had completed postgraduate studies. Because most Americans could not afford the cost of adopting a baby from China (from $15,000 to $20,000), the median household income of those adopting in the 1990s was high, in the $70,000-to-$90,000 range. The process was not only expensive but tedious and laborious, requiring background checks by the FBI, a visit from a social worker, fingerprinting by the police, and filing papers with the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Typically, the adopting parents had to wait a year and a half just to have the paperwork completed.
The wait period was excruciating for many couples, especially as some formed psychological bonds with their future children even before meeting them in China. For instance, one Massachusetts woman had already received a photograph of the Chinese baby she would be adopting when the PRC abruptly closed its adoption program after the negative New York Times Sunday magazine article. “She spent eight months in purgatory, looking at that picture and thinking about how her baby was faring in a very distant country and orphanage,” wrote Christine Kukka in the anthology A Passage to the Heart: Writings from Families with Children from China. Shanti Fry remembered writing a new will: “I thought that if I got a child, Jeff and I could be traveling back with her from China and the plane would crash and somehow I would die and Jeff and the baby would survive—in the middle of the Pacific Ocean!”
For the lucky, the long-anticipated date would eventually arrive. The adoptive parents would fly to China, meet with orphanage officials, and receive their babies in hotel rooms and lobbies. After the realities of parenthood sank in—the diapers, the squalls, the constant feedings—some agonized over the best way to handle the ethnicity of their new children. Should they be reared as Americans